Reasons Why we Should, and Shouldn't, Re-Sign Cesc Fabregas

I've been going over this subject in my head a lot over the last few days, and thought I'd share my ramblings with you. So here's the case for and against bring Cesc back home, or taking him away from home, it's all quite confusing really.

Why we shouldn't re-sign Cesc:

- He's a bit of a knob, really. Imagine someone gives you a massive break in your career, enabling you to perform a job you love for millions of pounds. How do you repay them? Well, by saying, on almost a weekly basis, how you will leave this job and go back to your former employer - the one you left in the first place precisely because they refused to give you a chance. I found Cesc's continuous flirtation with Barca during his Arsenal career both tiresome and deeply disrespectful to both Arsene and Arsenal. I get it - you're from Barcelona. If you loved it so so much there, why did you leave? Arsenal are a massive club, and the whole "Barca DNA", "We all know I'll go back one day" story annoyed me hugely. We are not some kind of finishing school for footballing prodigies before they go on to the true club of their dreams. We are Arsenal and you should be honoured to play for us. Basically, don't come crying back to us after running off with your high-school sweetheart and finding out, or in fact remembering, they're a total psycho. You made your bed and you can lie in it.

- Beyond his yearly flirtation, there was the actual manner he left. Trying to push through a move after the 2010 world cup, failing, and then sulking for a season. Let's take a step back here - again, this is a guy being paid millions of pounds to play football, and he's sulking. It was a pathetic, shameful farce. That we allow such things to occur is a major reason why western civilization is ultimately doomed. Then, in 2011, there was the alleged "strike" - again, the self-entitlement and disrespect here is unbelievable. Yes, Cesc is far from alone in the self-entitlement stakes when it comes to football. But, do we want to re-sign such a person? There seems to be a good culture in the dressing room, with very few of the current squad in the primadonna mould that previous squads used to have in spades (I'm looking at you, van Persie, Adebayor, Nasri, etc.) Could Cesc re-adjust to being a squad member, rather than being club captain? Could he take on a auxiliary, rather than central, place in the team?

- He's certainly had an odd time at Barca. Despite creating and scoring tons of goals, the club's fans have never really taken to him. He doesn't seem to have grasped what many thought would be his destiny, and become the new Xavi. There is a school of thought that suggests he is incredibly undervalued by Barca, and this is probably true. But his inability to fit neatly into the team ethic of Barca is interesting. There is only player allowed a free role at the club, and that's Messi. Cesc doesn't seem to have the discipline to play a more controlled deep game, or play further forward. Spain have also seemed to be unsure of where to deploy him - he basically started the European Championship final as a false nine, blowing the minds of hispters around the world. One of the Barca coaches basically said he was a very chaotic player, if I remember correctly. This kinda fits in with the primadonna personality - I play where I want. This pays off most of the time - like in the European Championship final - but it's hard to build a team around such a player, or even to put your full trust in them on the field.

- The club would seem to have a plan for transfers this summer that doesn't include Cesc. In terms of our priorities this summer, a new right-back, striker, goalkeeper and (please please please) a holding midfielder are surely higher up the list. There is an argument that Cesc would be a luxury signing that would take up a large chunk of our budget. I can definitely see this argument in some respects (although I will entirely dismiss it later).

- Which brings us on to my main area of concern - I didn't actually like the style of play, or the footballing culture I suppose, of the Cesc-centric teams seen between about 2006 and 2011. Think about the best teams under Wenger and the attributes that they had - power, strength, and speed. You would be hard pressed to use any of those adjectives when describing Cesc. I read a great quote from Lehmann the other day, who said that when we transitioned from the invincibles side to that centred around Cesc, the team basically slowed down. Two touches were replaced by three or four. We went from a team that destroyed teams on the counter-attack to one that tried to pass the opposing team to death. Remember how many games in 2002 to 2004 were over by half-time? How we would come flying out the traps and knockout our opponents before they had time to settle? And then think about all the games of the Cesc-era where the first half would pass everyone by. Where we would allow the opposition team to park the bus, rather than drive their bus off a cliff. Endless passing triangles involving Cesc, Hleb, Rosicky, Nasri, Denilson, etc. At its worst, the Cesc led teams were the definition of sterile domination. And I do put a large slice of blame on Cesc for this style (and, of course, Arsene for enabling it). Cesc essentially replaced Vieira in the side. We went from a guy who was so direct that he would tackle and pass the ball in the same motion to one that would want about 3-4 touches before even thinking about the next move. For the life of me, I can't work out why Wenger abandoned the mould that had brought his so much success - speed and power - and replaced it with the wimpy, tiki-taka football that made us a laughing stock. The only reason I think he did so is because he had Cesc, he believed in him, and he built a team in his image. People often call Cesc direct, and he is in a Barca team where passing is treated as an almost holy event. But for Arsenal, he was the orchestrator, and he often orchestrated not a lot. A return of Cesc would upset the balance of a team that could, if everyone was fit (please stop laughing) have a good deal of power and directness to it, as typified by its new leader, Aaron Ramsey.

So this, for me is the case against Cesc - a disrepectful brat who would disrupt the balance of the team, both on and off the pitch, and who might see us return to the dark days of the weakest teams of the Wenger era - teams that were regularly bullied off the pitch, but only after completing hundreds of meaningless passes. He might also take up a big slice of a transfer budget that needs to be focused on other positions.

Why we should sign Cesc:

- As mentioned above, he's hardly alone in the acting like a knob stakes when it comes to transfers. From Odemwingie to Berbatov to Bale to even our failed bid for Suarez, footballers have a very loose idea of contract law. Namely, the contract is great in terms of the money they make from it, but the idea this is a binding agreement to actually keep them at a club is something that footballers appear to be astonished by on a regular basis. Ronaldo described himself as a slave, lest we forget, because United tried to hold him to his 100k+ a week contract. So, yeah, while Cesc didn't cover himself in glory during his departure from the club, very few footballers do. I'm not saying he deserves a pass on this one, just that most footballers act like knobs most of the time.

-  Seeing him come back will undoubtedly be very emotional, and it would almost be a symbolic statement of how, after years of selling our best players, we are now committed to not only keeping ours, but buying top players from other teams. In other words, it would help to prove that Ozil was not a one-off signing but the start of a parade of top players coming to the club.

- For 30m, it's a bargain. And what was the point of spending months of the 2011 summer window haggling over a buy-back clause if we're not going to use it? It just looks like a colossal waste of time, another damning part of a summer that should have cost Arsene his job. Players like Cesc don't become openly available on the market very often, and certainly not at knockdown prices.

- If we don't buy him, he will go to Chelsea. Chelsea. Let's just repeat this again - he will sign for Chelsea if we don't sign him. The worst club in world football. And he will play against us, and score against us, and we'll have to watch as he celebrates winning all kind of stuff with Chelsea, and it'll be gross. I would be up for paying 30m just to make sure he didn't play for Chelsea.

- The most compelling reason, is pretty simple - he's really good at football. Really, really good. This might seem at odds with my takedown of the "Cesc-era teams" above, but I'm not that stupid. He was  the bright spot in some of the worst teams I've seen Wenger put out at the club. A midfield combining Cesc, Ozil and Ramsey would surely be the best in the Premier League. If, and this is a big if, we could harness all the great parts of Cesc's game - his creativity and vision - and find a way to put them into the team without destroying the nascent balance that seems to exist there...it could be very fun to watch.

- Wenger's transfer "plans" have, by and large, utterly failed in the last few summers. Let's not pretend there was some kind of master plan last summer. We signed Yaya "competition winner" Sanogo (still yet to score an Arsenal goal), re-signed Flamini (who has been rubbish since about December ), a goalkeeper who played 2-3(?) games, and, of course, Ozil. But we only signed Ozil after failing to sign Higuain, Suarez and god knows how many other strikers. If you think there was a Wenger masterplan to wait until the 11th hour to sign Ozil, then you probably have a figurine of Wenger in your bedroom who you pray to every night. And what about January? No striker, despite Giroud's form having fallen off a cliff. Instead, we signed an over-the-hill midfielder who was injured. And let's go further back. The debacle of 2012 - selling the lynchpin of our midfield, and the best striker in the country to our supposed rivals. As for 2011, where to start? Selling our best two midfielders. Signing Park Chu-Young and Andre Santos. Haggling for months over Joel Campbell, who, to date, has still to make his Arsenal debut.

In short, I'm not convinced there is a plan. Or to put it another way: if there is a plan, recent summers have shown that Wenger is terrible at executing it. I'm fairly convinced, for example, that Jenkinson will start the first game of the season. We are already being linked with a host of strikers, but we have failed to buy a striker in the last four windows. (Bonus trivia question - when was the last time Arsene bought a world-class striker in his prime?) So, rather than rely on Wenger's masterplan, how about we actually sign a top player who's a) available and b) cheap.

- And my final piece of the puzzle - we have loads of money and should actually spend it on top players. This for me, is really important. We heard a lot of guff this week from Gazidis about the "strict budget" that Arsene is working with - this is patently nonsense. It is total spin, and I have no idea why the club is doing it. We are coming off the back of the biggest TV deal in history. We have massive, new sponsorship deals. We are charging the fans an extra 3% on top of the highest ticket prices in England. We have 100m in the bank, at least, already. We could sign Cesc for 30m and still have more than enough money to buy a world class right-back, defensive mid, striker and goalkeeper. We really do. If you think we don't, someone has lied to you. The money is there, in black and white, in the club accounts. We already have the 11th highest wage bill in the entirety of world sports. We are loaded - totally loaded. We can afford multiple, big transfers this summer.

Why we don't spend this money is an interesting question. There is the issue, of course, that the club's large cash balances make our absentee owner richer each day. I don't think that should ever be ignored. But I think there is a wider issue here. Despite the purchase of Ozil, Wenger is ultimately a conservative in the transfer market. He is already talking up "internal solutions", because he prefers to work with what he knows, than take risks. I imagine that Martinez will be promoted to back up keeper, for example. This is the strategy that saw Bendtner become our second-choice striker for parts of last season, and which saw us re-sign Flamini instead of the clearly more talented Gustavo.

If Wenger doesn't re-sign Cesc, it smacks of a fundamental conservatism to transfers that, to be frank, is holding the club back. Once you have gone big, as we did with Ozil, the secret is out - we can afford these deals. My concern if we don't go in for Cesc is that it shows that Wenger hasn't really changed. The FA Cup win of this year will not be the start of a new era, but a poignant moment of unjustified hope that fizzled out as soon as it arose.

It's the start of the summer, so we shall see how things play out. Maybe we will get all the players we need. But past windows under Wenger suggest we won't. There's only so many disastrous periods of transfer activity, or inactivity, I can take.

And, my very final point, as Gunnerblog pointed out, is this: is there really a scenario where we regret buying Cesc? It's hard to imagine. On the contrary, there are loads in terms of the opposite - Cesc scoring the winning goal for Chelsea in the Champions League final. Cesc celebrating with Mourinho. Cesc having to do the "non-celebration" as he completes his hat-trick against us at the Emirates. Imagine all of these for a moment before saying you don't want him back. This isn't just knee-jerk emotionalism - it is the potential scenario of watching a top player, who we could have signed, bring success to another club.

But the biggest reason for me to re-sign Cesc is I want to see real proof that Arsene has changed. That the new contract was justified beyond largely sentimental reasons. If not, we may be looking down the barrel of another summer farce, with at least two more to come.

I genuinely hope I'm wrong.